Redemption's Shadow

by Rick Partlow

  He nearly flinched when the mecha began to move, their servos humming in a mechanical chorus. He’d never seen a mech kneel, much less a whole battalion of them, and a tingling went up his spine at the sight. Dozens of mecha, hundreds of tons of metal, struck the ground with a ringing blow and stayed still, their pilots’ staring straight at him. The weight of their attention seemed to bear him into the ground, as if the gravity had increased beneath his feet.

  “We swear fealty to you, Lord Guardian,” Pistorius said, his voice clear and carrying, “until our deaths or yours, as long as you claim the title and uphold the responsibilities of the Guardian of Sparta. May Mithra claim our souls if we be unfaithful.”

  Logan tried to respond and found he had to clear his throat before he could speak the words.

  “I accept your oaths, and in return, I give one of my own. I swear that, as Guardian of Sparta, I will protect her from all her enemies, even if my own life be forfeit.” The ceremony ended there, but he added something else, the words coming to him as if whispered into his ear by the Spenta Mainyu angels. “And I also swear that if any among you break this oath, you won’t have to wait for Mithra to claim your souls. I’ll deliver them personally.”

  Gripping the sword in his hand, Logan walked past the genuflecting troops and on toward the palace steps, his brother and his Rangers following.

  It was time to claim the throne he’d won.

  3

  Sweat trickled down Katy’s back and she felt a chill despite the oppressive heat of the cargo truck’s sheet-metal bed. Even covered with a cloth canopy, it had felt like an oven under the mid-day sun and any exposed metal had burned her skin when she touched it to steady herself against the swaying gait of the old truck on the dirt road and the occasional jolt as it hit a pothole. Tucked into the shadow of the sandy hillside, out of the punishing brutality of a Revelation afternoon, she should have felt relief. But what the shade had taken away, her nerves were giving back.

  She held her breath to try to hear the movement in the distance, but the faint hiss of the wind muffled the sound. Even the low metallic groans of the truck as she or Constantine or Beck shifted their weight in the bed seemed to drown out everything outside. Once every few seconds, she heard a faint pinging sound and thought it was a rifle scraping against a tactical vest or the distant clamor of a mech in motion until she realized it was simply the truck body contracting as it cooled in the shade.

  Constantine was up by the cab, one hand pressed against the metal there as if he could caution Lila and Antonia to silence through the touch, while Beck huddled against the side closest to the hill. Both men were burned red by the sun despite the head coverings they’d rigged up from rags, and she knew she was, too. She could feel the sting on her cheeks and her nose and knew her face would be peeling soon. If she lived long enough.

  Constantine looked back at her and she pointed to her ear and gave him a questioning look. Did he hear anything? He shook his head, but she still gripped the service pistol tightly. Every minute or so, her palm would get so sweaty just from holding it that she would have to shift it to her left hand and wipe her right dry against her pant leg. Wiping it on her shirt wouldn’t have done any good, since it was already soaked.

  They’d heard the drop-ship passing overhead nearly an hour ago. Had it been that long? She resisted the urge to check her ‘link again to see how much time had passed. It could have just been a random air patrol, could have gone by without noticing them at all…but they couldn’t take the chance.

  And I can’t take this shit anymore.

  Katy picked her steps across the truck bed, keeping her feet on well-anchored metal to avoid tell-tale creaks and squeaks and groans. She steadied herself with a hand on Nicolai Constantine’s shoulder and leaned close to his ear. He stank of dried sweat but so did they all.

  “I’m going to take a look around,” she told him, keeping her voice low but not whispering. Lyta Randell had taught her that a whisper carried further than simply speaking softly.

  Constantine turned to spear her with a glare, then shook his head.

  “No, I’ll go,” he insisted, gesturing at the pistol. “Give me the gun.”

  “Your hands are still in no shape for shooting,” she said. “I won’t do anything stupid. I know how to low-crawl and how to take my time and not get spotted. But I have to get out of this damned truck before I go absolutely bugnuts crazy. I feel like I can’t breathe in here.”

  The intelligence officer hissed out a sigh, obviously wanting to argue with her but realizing it would be futile.

  “Pull your shemagh up over your face,” he told her, reaching up to tug the jury-rigged covering up over her chin. “Keep your eyes down to avoid the sun reflecting off your skin. If you see anything, don’t try to use your ‘link to call me and don’t rush back inside. Take your time and make sure you’re back in the shadows before you try to get back in the truck. If you have to, crawl underneath the vehicle and wait there until it’s clear.”

  Kat bit her lip to keep from making a sarcastic remark about how he didn’t need to point out the incredibly obvious when just the painfully obvious would do. The older man felt responsible for her, thinking of her as Logan’s wife, but in her head, she was a Spartan military officer first and didn’t need her hand held.

  “I’ll be careful,” she said, patting him on the arm.

  Beck didn’t even bother to object, eyes wide with disbelief as he watched her clamber over the tailgate, pushing aside the canvas cover. He said nothing, but he might as well have been screaming “better you than me.”

  Katy winced at the metallic grunt of the cargo bed protesting her weight and then celebrating as she dropped off the back. Her boot soles crunched the loose sand against the hardpack beneath it and she nearly slipped on the slick ground, her left hand grabbing at the tailgate for support. Her right-hand fingers tightened their grip on the pistol in sympathetic reflex and it was only the trigger discipline she’d learned in the Academy and had reinforced by Lyta Randell that kept her from accidentally firing off a round.

  That would have been brilliant, popping off a round and giving away our position like a huge freaking idiot.

  The hills between the ocean and the canyons were fairly desolate, with only a few stands of twisted and gnarled trees, genetically engineered a thousand years ago to survive on this inhospitable world. No grass penetrated the hard-packed sand and sandstone, only a thick coating of blue-green fungus likewise introduced by Imperial terraformers. It was everywhere on the worlds they’d altered, from furnace-hot deserts to the deepest oceans, sometimes buried beneath other flora when they’d had the time and opportunity to finish the job. On worlds like Revelation, though, where the end of the Empire had come before the end of the work on the ecosystem, the fungus was still present, trying its best to keep the world habitable in the face of physics and orbital mechanics.

  The fungus added a strange, aqua tint to the red soil out here, made the place seem just that much more alien compared to Sparta or her own home of Massalia. The gangly scout mech hopping birdlike across the crest of a hill a kilometer away only underscored the incongruity of the place. Her stomach dropped at the sight of the thing, knowing the shelter of the hill, the shadow, and her attempts at camouflage wouldn’t matter to the lidar, radar and thermal scanners the mech carried. If the thing as much as looked their way, they were dead.

  Maybe it will keep moving, not even turn this way. It’s just one mech. They probably unloaded it from the drop-ship then moved on to drop another in a different map sector. It might not see us…

  That dream lasted for the space of ten seconds, dying at the sight of the platoon of Jeuta infantry spread out in a broad wedge, walking ahead of the Hopper, heading down the road directly toward them.

  Katy ignored everything Constantine had told her and jumped onto the back of the truck, pushing aside the cover, barely remembering to keep the pistol pointed safely upward.

  “There’s a Jeuta
scout mech heading this way,” she said, not even bothering to keep her voice down. “With an infantry escort. We need to run now, before they corner us in this damned truck.”

  Beck looked as if he wanted to piss his pants and she felt a surge of annoyance. The man was supposed to be a Ranger, which meant he’d been trained to deal with this sort of thing. Why was a pregnant pilot having to walk point on everything tactical? Then she remembered the pain medication he’d been taking and kicked herself. It was pretty strong stuff, enough to muddy his thoughts, and he was a corporal who’d only joined Wholesale Slaughter a year ago, shortly before the coup. This might be the first combat he’d ever seen.

  Constantine surged to his feet, not showing any of the corporal’s hesitation or his fear, though she was sure he had to be feeling it. “Go get the civilians. I’ll help Beck down.”

  His calm, businesslike demeanor helped to tamp down her own growing panic and she sucked in a long breath as she jogged to the front of the truck, letting it out slowly enough that she had herself back under control by the time she yanked open the passenger door.

  Antonia stared back at her, a combination of sensible fear and the sort of intense fascination teenagers seemed to have for anything dangerous shining in her dark eyes. Lila leaned across the cab, grabbing her shotgun from where it had been propped up between the seats.

  “What is it?” the older woman demanded.

  “Jeuta. They dropped a scout mech and infantry. We have to get out of this truck and get somewhere we can hold up.”

  Lila gave her the sort of look her own mother had offered when she’d said something extraordinarily stupid.

  “You think we’re going to outrun them on foot, girl? That’s suicide!”

  “We’re not outrunning a scout mech in this old heap,” Katy shot back, slamming a palm against the door. “Maybe on a paved road, but out here? On this dirt and sand? This is what they’re designed for, and there’s not as much as a tree for two kilometers on either side. They’d put a missile in us before we got a hundred meters. If we take off now, maybe they’ll think it’s an abandoned vehicle and not spend a lot of time searching the area.” She squeezed her eyes shut and nodded acknowledgment. “And yes, I know, it sounds lame to me just saying it, but I’ve been through a lot of shit over the past couple years and if it’s taught me anything, it’s that doing something and doing it fast is better than sitting around waiting for the perfect plan.”

  “Mom, let’s just go!” Antonia said, pushing past Katy and jumping down from the cab.

  “Damn it,” Lila muttered, but she followed her daughter out of the truck, bringing her shotgun with her and grabbing a shoulder bag from the seat. “I knew we should have stayed at the damned factory.”

  Constantine and Beck were already out of the truck bed and both men were wearing backpacks Katy recognized as the ones Lila had scrounged up to carry supplies in. Each had water, food and whatever spare clothes she’d been able to find, and Constantine shoved one at Katy as she approached.

  “Shit, Mom, there they are!” Antonio exclaimed, pointing north at the mech, still loping down the hill, almost in slow motion.

  “Watch your mouth, girl,” Lila cautioned her, whacking her mildly in the back of the head with her open palm.

  “We’re going west,” Constantine declared, heading out and waving for them to follow. “There’s a trail over there that leads around the other side of the next hill. If we can get over there before they spot this truck…”

  He trailed off, sparing his breath for a shuffling, jogging pace, keeping his steps narrow to avoid sliding on the sand-covered rock. Katy pushed Beck ahead of her, slipping an arm around Antonia and keeping the girl close while Lila brought up the rear, hands filled with her shotgun. The shadow of the hill pulled away from them like a tablecloth being ripped away and leaving the dishes behind, and suddenly, the system primary was beating down on them with unrestrained ferocity. The heat slammed into Katy with an almost physical force and she nearly stumbled and took Antonia down with her, the breath leaving her in a gasp.

  The trail Constantine was heading for was a good half a kilometer away and her legs were lead weights, reluctant to move at all, much less with any sort of grace. Katy felt obscenely exposed, her only comfort the fact that the curve of the terrain should hide them from the infantry.

  If that mech was scanning this way, though…

  She didn’t see it as much as felt it, maybe a sixth sense or maybe just enough of a difference in the sound quality or a flicker in her peripheral vision her mind didn’t register on a conscious level. Whatever intuition it was that warned Katy, she acted on it without thinking, dragging Antonia down to the ground with her and covering the girl with her body.

  “Get down!”

  The words were barely out of her mouth when the surface of the dirt road erupted in a chain of explosions only a few dozen meters away. Katy had her eyes squeezed shut, her hands over her ears, but the sound and the concussion smashed into her like the clapper of a bell and she rolled off Antonia involuntarily, stunned by the shockwave.

  Gun. The thought was clinical, detached, as if she were floating above the chaos, writing an after-action review to present to her superior officer. Couldn’t have been a missile or we’d be dead. He fired the chin cannon, but he didn’t get a clear targeting signature because of the heat.

  He also wouldn’t waste more than a few rounds on a small group of dismounts. He’d fired the cannon to put them down, immobilize them until he could get close enough to use his machine-guns…or for the infantry to reach them.

  “Come on!” she urged Antonia, pulling the girl to her feet, dragging her a meter across the thick sand cover on the road before she found her balance. “Move!”

  She thought she was yelling, but she couldn’t be sure. Her ears were ringing despite her attempt to shield them, her hearing muted, and dirt was raining down around them, the debris of the blast from the cannon rounds. The cloud of dust the shots had thrown up was their ally, their hope of making it out of there before the Jeuta could finish them off. She could just make out Constantine and Beck a few meters ahead of her, dim figures in the haze, and she was aware of Lila’s presence mostly from the woman’s insistent yells for her to hurry up.

  Gravel and cracked sandstone marked the edge of the road and the particulate mist began to clear almost immediately once they’d left the road and headed up the trail. Trail might have been too generous a name for it. It was simply a worn, flattened line in the hillside, probably caused by water drain-off in the rare, once-a-decade rainy seasons she’d heard about but never seen. The locals had told her stories of days and days of rain culminating in nightmare floods that could carry away entire settlements, but she hadn’t lived here long enough to experience it for herself.

  If the road had been slick, the trail was doubly so and their frantic trot slowed down to a cautious canter as their path climbed a steep angle up the hillside. Antonia scrambled up with seemingly little effort, quickly drawing ahead of Beck and only staying behind Constantine because he wouldn’t allow her to pass. Katy felt inadequate by comparison, leaning into the climb, the straps of the backpack biting into her shoulders, her thigh muscles burning with the strain.

  “That mech is going to circle around and try to get in front of us,” Lila warned from just over her right shoulder, her voice clearer as Katy’s ears recovered. “I saw it heading that way.”

  Katy didn’t answer, saving her breath for the climb, her legs moving like pistons.

  Very slow pistons, on an old, internal combustion engine that’s just about out of fuel.

  She had her head down, concentrating on the path, so it came as a pleasant surprise to her when they reached the top of the hill. Katy pushed one last, long step and when she straightened, it was onto a flat surface…which was good and bad. The bad part, she quickly discovered, was that she was cresting a hill in front of God and radar, with a ten-meter-tall scout mech pounding toward them at thirty
kilometers an hour, less than two kilometers away.

  There was no way around it, no way to hug the hillside just below the top the way the Rangers taught, because the trail went where it went and everywhere else was too slick and too steep to climb. Ahead of her, Constantine and Antonia were pushing forward, more fear on the man’s face than the girl’s, perhaps because he knew better than she did what their fate would be if the machine caught up with them. Beck was struggling to keep up, his uninjured arm cradling the other, face screwed up in agony and dripping with sweat.

  Katy gulped down a breath and caught up with the Ranger, slipping an arm around his shoulder and urging him along, trying not to look at the Hopper, as if ignoring it would make it go away. She heard Lila’s heavy footfalls behind her, heard the woman’s labored breath and worried she would fall behind. She wanted to stop and check on her, but was running on the ragged edge herself and wasn’t sure she could get started again if she stopped now.

  An angry hornet buzzed somewhere a few meters over Katy’s head and she flinched, wondering why the hell the Imperial terraformers had brought the insects here in the first place. Another whine, just slightly closer, and she saw a puff of soil rise a few centimeters off the ground seven or eight meters past them at an impact, and suddenly, she realized it wasn’t insects but machine-gun bullets. The far-off, chattering echo of the Hopper’s anti-personnel turret rolled across the hillside, a spiteful challenge. The distance was just outside the gun’s effective range, but the pilot was lobbing the rounds in at them, bouncing them off the hard ground, showing them a foretaste of their eventual fate.